“Shame,” Oliver said, and Ben said, yes, it was a shame, but we must all get together soon, with a whopping great note of insincerity in his voice. Then we exchanged the usual pleasantries about Christmas, and established that Rose had invited Oliver to our place for New Year’s Eve, which meant that Ben and he would be bonding over drinks rather sooner than Ben had bargained for.
We waited outside for what felt like hours while one taxi after another sailed past with its light off, and eventually when we did get one to stop, the driver refused to go south of the river, the bastard, even though the cabbie’s code says they have to.
“You go on,” I said to Ben. “I’ll get a bus.”
He paused, his hand on the cab’s open door. “Are you getting in or not, mate?” said the driver.
Then Ben said, “Why not come back to mine?”
I said, “Okay.”
I didn’t exactly stay over at Ben’s often, but I sometimes did, if we’d been out and I’d missed the last train or something. We’d get a kebab from the place at the bottom of Ben’s road – falafel in pita with extra chilli sauce, no onion on Ben’s, and a giant bag of greasy chips – and give fingerfuls of hummus to Winston Purrchill, Ben’s black and white rescue cat, who has cosmopolitan taste in food. Then I’d clean my teeth with a dollop of toothpaste on my finger and wash my face with Ben’s soap, which always left my skin feeling dry and tight the next day, and he’d offer to sleep on the sofa and let me have his bed, and I’d say I’d be fine on the sofa, and it would all be totally normal.
But that night things felt a bit different. We sat in silence in the back of the taxi, the space between us feeling like it was somehow either too large or two small. After a bit I said, “So what did you think?”
“Full of cunts,” Ben said. “Why did you make us go? Just, why, Ellie?”
“Didn’t you like looking at the hot women?” I asked.
Ben shrugged. “They were okay. I don’t really get girls who just want to parade around in designer clothes and swish their hair, you know that. I don’t do arm candy – apart from you of course,” he added gallantly.
I slid over and elbowed him in the ribs to show I treated that comment with the contempt it deserved, and then stayed there, our arms touching. I couldn’t really think of anything else to say. I wondered about Ben’s perception of all those glossy, swishy-haired girls. Did he really not fancy them? Maybe he was right and they were just waiting for some rich bloke to come along and snap them up and marry them. But maybe they were also, I don’t know, hedge fund managers or heads of marketing for multinationals or whatever, who just cared a lot about their appearance and liked going to clubs with their friends, like Rose does. Like Rose, they’d have homes, and sisters who borrowed their shoes, and they’d leave hair in the bath, and sometimes eat a whole packet of Jaffa cakes even though they’d pay for it the next day with their IBS and have to spend an extra two hours in the gym. There was more to Rose than her glossy beauty – there was her sweetness and her cleverness and her fantastic sense of humour and her great taste. So surely Ben – or Oliver, or any man – would choose someone who was all of those things and looked like Rose, rather than someone like me who was some of them and didn’t.
How many calories had I eaten that day, I wondered. Two thousand? Three thousand? Rose only allowed herself (or as she puts it, “I am only allowed…” as if there was some external agency that dictated what she could and couldn’t eat) twelve hundred a day. I’d had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast and a tuna sandwich for lunch, and a Mars bar mid-afternoon because I was feeling a bit peckish and needed something to pass the time until five o’clock, and two pieces of toast and peanut butter before going out for the evening to line my stomach. And the tub of cheese footballs Ben and I had polished off (those things are like crack, and their arrival in the shops signals to me that Christmas has come). That was normal, surely? Okay, I hadn’t got my five a day, but I generally did. I ate a normal amount of food, didn’t I? But it wouldn’t be normal for the lithe army of size-eight girls I’d jealously admired earlier in the evening.
So I was relieved as well as disappointed that Ben didn’t ask the cab driver to stop at the kebab shop. We drove straight to his flat and went upstairs. Ben didn’t turn on the light, and when he went over to the window the street lamp outside shone briefly and brightly on his face before he pulled down the blind.
“Shall I take the sofa?” I asked. But Ben shook his head.
“Come here a second,” he said. I walked towards him slowly, still in my high heels and my black dress.
“Turn around,” he said. I did, and he unzipped my dress. But instead of sliding seductively to the floor, the dress stayed obstinately up, attached to the yards of industrial-strength tit tape that was holding it on to my unsexy flesh-coloured bra. And I was still wearing my horrible suck-it-all-in knickers (the sort that have a special flap thing for you to wee through, and leave deep red furrows on your skin, every stitch on every seam indelibly impressed).
“That’ll be all, Jeeves,” I said. “I can take care of the rest of the scaffolding.”
I heard Ben take a deep breath, as if he was going to say something important. But he just said, “Take the bed, then. I’ll sleep in here.”
I found an old T-shirt of his and put it on and got under the dark blue duvet, surrounded by the warm smell of him. Even with Winston’s comforting, purring weight on my hip, it took me a long time to fall asleep.
The next morning Rose and I caught our train with seconds to spare, and collapsed laughing in our seats, surrounded by carrier bags bulging with presents (Rose’s tastefully wrapped in shiny silver with grey chiffon ribbons, mine roughly swaddled in brown paper and string).
“So how was Mahiki?” Rose asked.
“Brilliant,” I said. “We had a fabulous time.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“I bags the bed by the window!” Rose ran through the door and threw herself and her suitcase down on one of the twin beds.
I laughed. “You can have whichever one you like, it’s your room after all.” Strictly speaking it wasn’t any more, of course, it was Dad and Serena’s guest room, and tastefully decorated with pristine white duvets and an abstract painting with splashes of bright jewel colours hanging above the fireplace. But it used to be Rose’s – she’d fallen in love with it as a ten-year-old because if you leaned out of the window and craned your neck you could see a little slice of river, and sometimes swans gliding past.
The room that used to be mine is at the very top of the house, converted from an attic, and I didn’t care that all you could see out of its tiny windows was sky. I loved the idea of my own little kingdom right at the top of the house, where I could shut myself away for hours with a book, impervious to Rose’s entreaties to come down and play with her. That room has been turned into a study for Serena, with a squashy sofa that pulls out into a double bed where Granny and Grandpa sleep. Every Christmas Dad tactfully asks them if they wouldn’t prefer to stay in Rose’s room, and every Christmas they tell him not to be ridiculous, and insist they can manage the stairs perfectly well.
Granny and Grandpa are Mum’s parents, and they’ve spent every Christmas with us since we moved here. It’s strange to remember the first year, with Mum and Dad so full of excitement and plans to keep chickens and geese in the garden and perhaps even a pig. Mum had all sorts of ideas about sustainability and getting back to the land – she was always a bit of an early adopter, as the market research types call it. Sometimes I look at photos of her and Dad when they first met, and she was all dyed black hair and trailing lace shawls and elbow-length gloves, and it’s clear that she was right in there when the whole Goth thing was taking off, too. In fact she and Dad met at a Joy Division concert – Dad says he took one look at her figure in her purple brocade corset and leather skirt and realised then and there that she was the one for him. God knows what Granny and Grandpa must have made of their eccentric only daughter, who went off to uni
versity to study computer science and came back after her first term dressed like a vampire, and after her second, pregnant with me.
In those days lots of people still felt they ‘had to get married’, but Mum and Dad were unconventional enough that they wouldn’t have bothered, except they were so madly in love they thought it seemed like a brilliant idea. So off to Chelsea Register Office they went, Mum’s corset laced more tightly than ever, and then off to France to spend a weekend camping by way of a honeymoon. This, as I remember asking Mum to tell me over and over again as a bedtime story, was an unmitigated disaster. It rained and rained and their tent leaked and their meagre supply of food got waterlogged, and they ended up hitchhiking to the nearest village and taking shelter in a tiny little café where they could at least use a clean loo and have something to eat. Mum said it was such a relief to be warm and dry and the cassoulet was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted, and the waitress was so kind and pretty that Mum said to Dad, “Luke, if this baby is a girl, we are going to name her after that woman.” She hadn’t even asked the waitress her name at that stage – it could have been Clothilde or something vile, but it was Elodie. By the time Rose was born Mum had got over herself a bit and ditched the black clothes and she and Dad were living in a little flat in Earl’s Court while Dad and his business partner Stu worked silly hours to get their software developing business off the ground. She always said that she and Dad loved me so much they simply couldn’t wait to have another baby to love as well, even though they were grindingly poor, and that when Rose came along they were so overwhelmed by her beauty (utter nonsense, I’ve seen pictures and she was a wrinkly little troll of a child) that they called her Rosamund – rose of the world. But grandiose names for children don’t tend to stick and by the time we reached school age I was Ellie and Rose was Rose.
I suppose there would have been more children, Mum being the sort of woman who is never happier than when she’s pretending the cupboard under the stairs is a castle or cutting out clothes for paper dolls or baking gingerbread men. But they tried for a few years after Rose was born and eventually when no third baby was forthcoming Mum went to the doctor and had some tests and she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and had to have a radical hysterectomy. She was only twenty-eight. By that stage Dad and Stu’s business was starting to make waves. They developed an application called WebSurfer, one of the earliest internet browsers, and in the early nineties Dad accepted an offer from an American computing giant to buy the business and we moved to this little stone house with its two acres of garden and small slices of view of the Thames, with the plan of Dad taking early retirement and he and Mum living out their Good Life fantasies of chickens and pigs and a biodynamic orchard and all the rest. Except then Mum started feeling ill and tired all the time and when she went to the doctor she was told the cancer had come back and metastised and before the next Christmas she was dead.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Dad, even though he is a great one for sharing and has always encouraged us to talk about our feelings, and talked to us about his. But he kept buggering on, staying at home and looking after us as a full-time father with occasional long visits from Granny and Grandpa to help him out. I kept myself to myself, drowning my loneliness in books and schoolwork – and lonely I was, because Rose abruptly announced, when she was due to start secondary school, that she wanted to go away to boarding school.
I have no idea what Mallory Towers-inspired fantasies led to this decision, but in spite of all Dad’s gentle discouragement and my shameful emotional blackmail, Rose set her face in a stubborn mask and insisted she wanted to go, and in due course she did. I suppose that was the beginning of Rose and me becoming so different. It was during her time at Cheltenham Ladies’ College – because Rose didn’t want just any boarding school, she wanted that one – that my sister first acquired her poise, her graceful straight-backed walk, her ability to ‘get on’ with strangers, her careful neatness and love of art and fashion. All the things that set her apart from me.
Of course at the time I was just another teenager, happy enough if isolated at the local grammar school, studying hard and getting the results that would eventually win me a place at UCL to read English Lit. It didn’t occur to me that my sister was working towards a different goal. I’m not even sure if she knew it herself at the time, but Rose was aiming high, above where she perceived Dad and me to be, and if she left us behind she would be sad, but not regret it.
Anyway as I said, Dad was really noble and dedicated himself full-time to us. I don’t know if he had any girlfriends – if he did he certainly kept them away from his daughters. I suppose he felt that we were bound to resent any woman who aspired to take Mum’s place. It was only after we’d both gone to university and Dad had plunged back into the world of work (he started writing software for web-based interactive war games as a hobby and predictably he’s been hugely successful at it; for a man who genuinely couldn’t care less about money, Dad has an unfair share of the Midas touch) that Serena came on the scene.
She’s a graphics animator and she and Dad met when she pitched for the design of his latest game – apparently when the fire-breathing dragon she’d created burst on to the screen Dad literally screamed with fright. Anyway, Serena’s great. She’s quite a bit younger than Dad, when they got married she was thirty-four, the same age Mum was when she died (make of that what you will, Freudians), and Dad turned fifty last year so there’s twelve or thirteen years between them, but Dad is so young in every important way it really doesn’t matter. Serena is tiny and dark with close-cropped hair that she styles into artful disarray with wax or pomade or something, and designer steel-framed glasses. She’s never attempted to mother Rose and me, instead approaching us with calm friendliness, presumably hoping we’ll see how happy she makes Dad and accept her for that if not on her own merits. This has never been a problem for me – I think she’s fab and really, although we miss Mum, it would have been mad to expect Dad to have stayed single for ever. It’s been a bit more of an adjustment for Rose, though, and sometimes she makes things very difficult for poor Serena.
I was musing on all this whilst I unpacked my little wheelie case of four days’ worth of clothes and folded everything carefully away in the cupboard – Rose goes a bit mental if I’m messy when we’re sharing a room – but mostly I was just excited. All the traditions started by Mum, faithfully continued by Dad and sensibly left unchanged by Serena were set to unfold over the next few days. There would be the spag bol supper on Christmas Eve followed by a walk to the pub. The midnight service in the village church for those who wanted to go, which means Granny and Grandpa and occasionally Rose or me, but never Dad. The Christmas stockings that Dad still makes for me and Rose although we really, truly are too old for them now (and the bits of lovely Benefit make-up, cashmere mittens and the like that have started appearing in them in recent years lead me to suspect that the responsibility for assembling them has been passed to Serena). The turkey and bread sauce and the special nut roast Granny makes for Dad and me, and the Christmas punch that Grandpa mixes up. Every year it’s the same and every year from about the first of December I can feel a warm, fizzy excitement building in me as I think about it. I know it’s a bit tragic and I ought to have grown out of it by now, but I love Christmas, and although she’d never admit to something so uncool I know Rose does too. When I was putting my stuff away in the drawer Serena had carefully lined with white tissue paper, I saw she’d brought her special knickers that have little reindeer and sprigs of holly on them.
I was woken the next morning by bright light flooding into the room through the filmy white curtains, and realised the snow, which had been beginning to fall as we walked home from the Rose and Crown after last orders, had settled. I turned over and lay quietly for a while, enjoying the peculiar silence a blanket of snow brings with it, looking at the enticing lumpiness of my Christmas stocking, and wondering whether it would be safe to wake Rose. It wasn’t l
ong before the anticipation got too much for me and I got up, showered and dressed, by which time she was awake.
“Happy Christmas,” I said, and she said happy Christmas, grinning cheesily and doing a little bounce on her bed.
“Shall we open them?” she asked.
“Let’s,” I said, “And then let’s do the noble thing and take some coffee up to the olds.”
We ripped the wrapping paper off a wonderful haul of Burt’s Bees lip salve, Urban Decay eyeshadow, stripy wooly tights, chocolate seashells, a bottle of truffle oil for Rose and a giant jar of Marmite for me, paperback books and iPod socks, taking as much pleasure in the opening as we did when we were kids unveiling new clothes for our Sindy dolls and boxes of crayons. Finally everything was unwrapped, and the chocolate oranges unearthed from the stockings’ toes, and our beds were littered with shiny paper.
“Good loot,” I said.
“Good loot,” agreed Rose. “You go on down, I’ll get myself ready and be there in a sec.”
When I went into the kitchen Serena was already there, wearing rather racy red satin pyjamas and manhandling a massive turkey into the oven.
“Christ, what was I thinking when I bought this monster?” she said. “It only needs to feed seven and it’s the size of a hippo. I’ll be eating leftovers for months. Happy Christmas, Ellie.”
“Happy Christmas,” I said, and once she’d parked the turkey I kissed her smooth, honey-coloured cheek. “We’ve just opened our stockings. Gorgeous stuff. I never knew Dad had discovered Burt’s Bees.”
Serena laughed. “I’d tell you I’m trying to turn him into a metrosexual but you’d never buy it,” she said. “Although of course it’s not Luke who’s the metrosexual, it’s Father Christmas. Maybe it’s one of Rudolph’s jobs to get him Grazia every week.”
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 5
